Nomination Roll Call

Welcome to the most interesting part of any convention--the roll call for the party nomination for President of the United States.

Whew! Glad we got here!

And right off the bat, California refuses to cast its 441 delegates, preferring instead to pass. I found this very interesting. Although it's likely that the California delegation is trying to orchestrate events so that its huge delegate count will be the one to send Obama over the 2021 number needed for nomination by acclamation it remains an interesting political manuever from a state the Hillary won by a large margin.

Should be fun to watch.

And Arkansas cast its votes for Obama. Curiouser and curiouser.

yeah, I'm a little perturbed by the number of states passing part or all of their delegates. If this snowballs (as it has in plenty of conventions in the past) then the convention could quickly pass out of the control of the Obama camp.

And that would be bad.

I was kind of wistfully hopoing to witness one of the great conventions of yore, like when Garfield manipulated the convention in Cincinnati to switch from Sherman to him or the great drama of the JFK conventions, with back-room dealing in smoky suites and a last-second rush to secure the VP nod. Right now it looks like the convention is waiting for something, as if they expect someone to make a huge move--like, say, a state that previously passed casting its votes for Clinton at a pivotal moment.

That would be awesome.

However, I think this has been orchestrated so that Clinton, speaking for the NY delegation, is the individual that moves for nomination by acclamation.

*grin*

At least until Bill's speech in a couple of hours or so.

And the script goes according to plan--Hillary steps up to the microphone and sends the New York delegates to Barack Obama after the state of Illinois cedes its spot and yields.

And so it is done.

or at least it would be if this guy would ever shut up.

and the acclamation motion is on the floor.

*sigh*

We had an opportunity to watch an actual political process at work. We could have had a convention where things weren't scripted, where the people that these delegates represent could have seen their votes at work. We could have witnessed a situation in which two candidates, who statistically tied in the popular vote, underwent a trial by fire as the delegates determined in honest fashion which candidate was truly the best for their party and their choice as the best President for the country.

What we got was a scripted mini-soap opera, with political pundits hinting darkly at undercurrents on the convention floor while in the Obama and Clinton camps the deal had already been struck--Hillary moves for the acclamation and Obama covers all of her existing campaign debt.

But the beauty of the process, the process that was superseded by a political party's need to show a unified front, still remains. And all throughout the country, the citizens who watched the roll call witnessed something that I, at least, have never seen during the nomination process before. When the defeated candidate made her motion for acclamation, some of the delegates booed...